Techdirt have a piece of news regarding a patent troll that claims to own Podcasting. If the company succeeds the impact could be huge.

“We’ve written a few times about a patent trolling operation called Personal Audio. Like so many patent trolling companies, who’s actually behind it is something of a mystery, but it does have an empty office in East Texas that no one ever goes to. It sued Apple and others claiming that it held patents on the concept of “playlists” and actually scored some victories. Amazingly, it sued Apple multiple times over the same patent, arguing that small changes to its products were new violations.

Well, the company is back with a “new” patent, 8,112,504, called a “System for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence” and appears to be claiming that podcasting itself violates the patent — and has sued three podcasters, including Adam Carolla’s “ACE Broadcasting,” HowStuffWorks and Togi Entertainment. Personal Audio focuses on claim 31 of the patent, which you can read here:”

More at Techdirt.